Last Message Read Online Free Page B

me. His eyes had grown to the great size they had been when he first saw me—the fear had returned. I lay flat and let him cover me. We could hear men getting out of the truck and then entering the house without knocking; we heard angry, accusatory voices and Yvette’s frightened one-word answers. Then we heard footsteps approaching the barn.
    â€œAnything interesting?” asked Mom.
    â€œMom, just let me read!”
    Jean worked frantically, patting down the sod over me. He reached into the straw, found a large hollow strand and handed it to me, motioning for me to put it in my mouth and hold it up. I did. Then he mimed closing my eyes and mouth and began to throw the dirt, then sod, right over my face. I gasped, closed my nostrils with two fingers and breathed through the straw. I could hear the voices calling out his name, more straw being tossed on top of my grave and then several empty wooden feed buckets jammed into place near my head and inches from the end of the pen, so the straw that I breathed through was between them and the wall. The chickens wouldn’t step on it or peck at it there.
    Then I heard the spade being flung away and Jean stepping over the wired fence into the pigpen, addressing his visitors as he went.
    â€œJe suis ici.”
    â€œAh, Monsieur Noel, bon soir.”
    It was a sickly sweet voice, with about as much sincerity as the devil might have.
    â€œBon soir,” said Jean.
    â€œVous admirez les cochons, je pense.”
    â€œNon, je travaille.”
    â€œNous recherchons un Américain. Un aviateur, un pilote, un ennemi de la France, un diable. L’avez-vous vu?”
    â€œUn Américain? Non.”
    Jean’s voice was shaky. That wasn’t good.
    They began to search the barn. By that time, the chickens were scratching around on the ground right over me. I tried not to breathe through my nose, into which I had thrust my fingers. It wasn’t easy. But you can do that sort of thing when your life depends on it. The Milice men didn’t come near me. They obviously didn’t fancy entering the pigpen, didn’t want to dirty their gleaming jackboots in the manure or be run at by the big sow. Moments later they were gone, but then I heard them smashing things in the house, shouting something about the fireplace, yelling at the Noels. Yvette cried loudly and her children screamed as something—a hammer maybe, or an ax—whacked their stone floors.
    But the Noels revealed nothing…for me.
    And they stayed quiet for the better part of the month. Yvette resented me at first, but in a week or two she grew less frightened and then doted on me like a sister. I spent most of every day in the barn, often buried in the grave, but she would bring me breakfast, lunch and dinner, wonderful French peasant food of homemade bread and tasty soup and chicken and eggs and sometimes even her sweet homemade pastry. Yvette couldn’t read or write, and neither could Jean, but they were the nicest human beings I ever met. Sometimes, when it got dark, they would even sneak me into the house to play a game of checkers or so we could converse in our fractured way, using lots of hand signals, Jean sitting at the little front window with the shutters open wide on another warm Provençal summer evening, watching for any movement along the dirt road toward his house.
    And all the time I was there, at least after the second day, I felt terrible. I felt as guilty as if I were helping Hitler.
    â€œGuilty?” I said out loud.
    â€œDid you say ‘guilty,’ buddy?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYes, you did.”
    â€œDon’t lie,” said Mom.
    â€œI guess I did, yeah, but I didn’t mean to. I was just surprised.”
    â€œSurprised?”
    â€œThis is getting a little weird. Just let me read.”
    Why, you ask, did I feel guilty?
    Because of what happened the second morning I was in the barn. It has stayed with me for the rest of my